One complex scene
DirectX 11 tessellation and some of the other effects have been added into Crysis 2 somewhat haphazardly after the fact, and some scenes have little or no such "enhanced" content. Others, though, are chock full of it. We've seen a few examples of specific tessellated objects; now let's take a closer look at a frame that ties a bunch of these elements together.

We're back in the first level of the game, having just emerged into the city for the first time. The building we were in is a tangled wreck of debris. Again, these are some pretty nice visuals for a modern game. The splintered wood and rubble is complex enough to look relatively natural and realistic, for the most part.

The wood on the floor isn't just a flat texture mapped to a flat surface. Instead, the boards are angled and warped—and tessellated heavily. Some of the boards really are just long stretches of flat surfaces, though, and even those are comprised of many thousands of tiny polygons.

The displacement-mapped bricks that we saw in the prior scene are back here, covering a partially destroyed wall. Once again, they look very nice, and the polygon counts are huge.

The splintered wood supports in the scene are also heavily tessellated, so much that the mesh begins to look like a solid surface.

A closer look at some of that tessellated wood reveals some straight, rectangular planks. The only really apparent complexity is at the splintered ends of one plank, but even those spikes aren't terribly jagged. They're just a handful of sharp points.

Amazingly, the flat window frame, the splintered plank, and the interior wall are all made up of incredibly dense polygon meshes.

Pulling back to our full scene once again, we note that beneath it all lies a blanket of wavy water, completely obscured but still present.